An “Other” Social Mobility, Viewed from the Standpoint of Exclusion

Ricardo Cuenca

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze how social mobility and social inclusion are perceived by a group of professionals from modest backgrounds, who graduated from public universities and whose personal histories reflect levels of exclusion. This qualitative study, which is organized in six dimensions of analysis—migration and territorial mobility, education, occupation and income, social capital, vulnerability, and expectations—shows four main findings, which inevitably also raise new working hypotheses. The findings are the following: that social mobility and social inclusion are heterogeneous processes that education remains a means of both mobility and inclusion, that social mobility coexists with inequality, and that mobility and social inclusion require broader means of conceptualization because of the difficulty of understanding this process in people with particular characteristics and from particular backgrounds.